The Oregon City Schools and Northwood Local Schools districts are planning cuts in spending as a result of Gov. John Kasich’s proposed budget next year.

There is a 1.5-percent increase in state foundation funds to schools in Kasich’s $55.5 billion biennial budget, but funding to K-12 will be cut by 15 percent as a result of a loss in federal stimulus money and an accelerated phase-out of a tax on tangible personal property. Oregon would see an 11-percent reduction in funding, while Northwood’s funding would drop by 14-percent

“We are very proud of what we are doing here,” said Superintendent Dennis Mock of the use of green technologies.

Buehrer Group, an architecture/engineering company from Maumee, designed the inclusion of the geothermal heating/cooling system, solar panels, and day lighting systems into the building that’ll soon be the new home for students in grades kindergarten to fifth. Brunner and Allen Central schools – the two aging buildings now housing the system’s 622 elementary students – will be closed at the end of the school year.

The Oregon City Schools District has cut costs in the last few years as a result of the retire/rehire program of teachers and administrators.

The program allows retiring personnel to collect their pensions and be rehired at a reduced salary to their former positions.

“We’ve done it for a number of teachers, and some of our counselors,” said Eric Heintschel, school board president. “The teachers retire, and they do get their full retirement benefits, and we do rehire them back into the district, but because they get their full retirement, we can hire them back at a significantly reduced salary than what we were paying them the year before. So the benefit of the school district is that we get experienced staff who knows the district at a significantly reduced salary from the year before when they were still in the teaching ranks. It is a benefit to them because they get their retirement, the amount that is determined how many years they had teaching, and they get their regular salary. But it does help the district.”

The Black Swamp Bird Observatory considers its banding program a “feather in its cap.”

The program, led by research director Mark Shieldcastle, has banded more than 500,000 birds over two decades. The BSBO banding station is the largest in the country, according to Kim Kaufman, executive director of the BSBO.

“We band more birds than any other station in the country on a regular basis,” Kaufman said. “That's a feather in our cap, but what it really represents is how important that (Magee) marsh is to migratory birds.”